My First Digital ATC

About a year ago my lovely husband gave me a piece of software by Serif called Digital Scrapbook Artist v2. Now it had taken me a year of my life and an online course to get to grips with even the basics of Adobe Photoshop Elements, so when I saw the starting screen on DSA2 I admit it I feared it would take as long and it took me a long time to actually get over that and just try it.

Serif; Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 and Daisy Trail 1

There was a lovely lady on Create and Craft/Ideal World demoing the software, and suddenly I got it. The digi kits you can get either individually as downloads from Daisy Trail or as collections on disc are truly stunning and I was lucky that after getting all hyper about the software, my long-suffering husband didn’t give up on me but gave me the rest of the available digi kits as part of my Christmas present. Isn’t he wonderful 🙂

As regular readers will know I am a member of Stamping Mad forum, and often take part in their ATC swap, well for January Glitter Monkey set the theme to digital, and I was away! A perfect excuse to get out the DSA2 and have a play. After a couple of very entertaining evenings I created the ATC you see above. It’s so much fun! Wish I’d got into this last year, it would have made my immobility much less boring!

Hoping to get the latest version of the software, Craft Artist soon. It’s the next generation of the software and has lots of card templates on it to design onto. If you haven’t heard of any of this stuff, check out the links at the end to find out more.

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6 Responses

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! I love how this ATC turned out. It is so sweet looking, great job! I got a chuckle when I read about your year long time spent with Adobe Photoshop Elements! I’ve had the program for about 1 year and I am only NOW starting to take a look at it. Like you, I found it intimidating. I hope it doesn’t take me a year, but it probably will – LOL!

Depending on what you want to do with Photoshop elements, if you want an EASY route in, do give the Craft Artist programe from Serif a go, there is a free trial of it on Daisy Trail. I bought it recently and you can also get free digi kits for it from Daisy trail too. If you want to use photoshop for cards/scrapbooking then the Serif route is SOOO much easier. Its nearly as versatile as Photoshop if you want to use it for creative projects, but with out all the jargon.

If you want to go the Photoshop route, keep an eye on the http://www.hp.com website, try not to let it kick you to the UK site, the best online courses and resourses are on the USA one 😉 The website detects your country but to override it go to the bottom of the page and click on MAP. Choose USA as location 😉 http://www.hp.com/go/learningcenter

The HP website has free online lessons and there is one on scrapbooking. It was on there where I learnt to create embellishments from scratch as well as create lots of effects. It’s very good as although there is a limited run on the course itself, which actual day you ‘show up to class’ doesn’t matter. You do need to sign up to the site, and to the individual class but they teach assuming no prior knowledge and if you choose to you can download or print the course material to have next to you as you try things out. You’ll still need to practice lots but its so much better than the advice generally available for the software.

Love the digi ATC. Haven’t used the Photoshop Elements as I use Paint Shop Pro and after fiddling around with it for months and months I eventually signed up for an online course – free one I hasten to add! It taught me a lot about the programme and how to use it and now I can show my DH how to do some things with the programe 🙂 I do admire the graphic artists who use Photoshop – now that is a seriously intimidating programme.

I have used some digi images and you have enthused about the new Serif software before, so much so that I visited the Daisy Trail site and Serif’s site, watched the various videos and thought it all looked like great fun but wouldn’t want to give up the stamps and ink just yet 🙂
Are you going to do a tutorial on the software??

If you are at all interested, try the free download and get a couple of the free digi kits. Its soo much fun!!! I still love my ink and stamps and wouldn’t give them up. Like you I didn’t think I’d like going digital, but you can alter so much of what is available in the kits that you still have a lot of creative input. Getting started there are premade layouts you can just add a greeting or your own photograph to. Once you get the hang of the programe you can play with colours sizes and transparencies of things.

I made this years valentines day card and also a sympathy card using DSA 2. I created the layout and then made extra pages to create my own decoupage. saved them out as jpegs and put them together in a word doc to print on a single page. Use this in a tool like you would anything else, its like having a craft shop on your computer and you can reuse everything as often as you like for your own projects.
I created my finished cards, in real life, the printing was just an element, as you would use a printed background paper, its a starting point to build from. There is so many possibilties I can’t wait to get some time to play with this. Want to make some boxes too.

No plans for tutorials with the software I’m afraid. I don’t have the skills to get screen shots of what I’m doing on a computer screen like they do, and to film over my shoulder the screen flicker would annoy the life out of all of us 😦 Bear in mind that I’ve had precious little play with the program yet, just following my nose as you say 🙂

Thank you so much for all the info and links. I will definitely give them a try. I don’t scrapbook but I do make cards and mixed media things. I also have tons of old family photos I am trying to clean up. I’d also love to try making my own embellishments and papers.

You’re welcome, I don’t scrapbook either but the software will give you LOADS of card and project ideas and the ability to turn images into embellishments as wel as having embellishments you could print off as they are. I never scrapbooked either and it really isn’t my ‘thing’. That said, I do like adding a nice background paper behind a photo and writting a note of where I was or who was in the photo and having the UNDO option and the ability to reuse all the elements time and again is lots of fun. Don’t know about you but I’ve got so many photos of people I ‘should’ know or thought I would remember where or when something was taken that it drives me nuts.

Its nice to add a story next to a photo, to make a page or card out of it. We’ve all got pictures just begging for a caption 😉

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